Read Novel Full Chapter 742: He’s Really Built Differently?
Chapter 742: He’s Really Built Differently?
It had been about a year since Liam made his public appearance with his private A380 — the one that turned heads across the globe and dominated the news cycle for weeks on end.
It couldn’t be helped. An eighteen-year-old owning a private jet, or any other aircraft, wouldn’t have garnered such a reaction. But a teenager who owned the largest commercial aircraft ever built, reworked into a private jet, was something else entirely.
After that appearance, governments around the world opened files on him, every one of them trying to investigate his background and trace the source of the money used to purchase the aircraft and convert it. And that was where the problem started. They couldn’t trace the money past a certain point, even though everything about it was clean.
Under normal circumstances, an unexplained fortune like that would have brought immediate scrutiny, like an audit, an investigation, a summons before a Senate committee to explain where the wealth had come from.
But when one considered that the kid had casually shown off a private variant of the biggest commercial aircraft in the world — a display of resources so vast it suggested he could out-lawyer, out-fund, and out-maneuver anyone who came at him — going against someone like that didn’t feel like the wisest decision.
They suspected money was being laundered through him. Then they discovered that Liam was one of JP Morgan’s top ultra-high-net-worth clients, and that only confused them further. JP Morgan would have done its own due diligence — full KYC verification — before onboarding him. And if someone truly was laundering money through the kid, then it had to be an operation more elaborate than anything they had ever seen.
The US government did its best regardless. The FBI dug as deep as it could into his life and his finances. The IRS dug deeper still. And everything came back spotless.
Then the inheritance record surfaced. The record was a legitimate, decades-old document naming Liam as the successor to a fortune. And it raised questions that should have been impossible to raise, because the record predated anything that could have explained it. A boy of eighteen could not have arranged a paper trail that had been sitting, aged and authentic, in the system for longer than he had been alive.
They even grounded the aircraft and inspected it end to end. They found nothing out of the ordinary, except for the fact that it was, indeed, a private variant of the largest aircraft ever built.
Since then, everything about Liam had been shrouded in mystery. No matter how deep anyone dug, no one could find a single thread that explained who he really was, or how any of what he possessed had come to be.
And Nova Technologies had only made it worse — most of all the livestream in which he revealed that his family carried flight as an inherited trait, and that they had connections to some entity out in the universe that manufactured the molecular assembler, a machine he stated cost roughly $70T, and which he had acquired for only $5B thanks to a discount his family’s ties had secured.
Every one of those revelations had detonated were explosive in their own right. Each had been picked apart by every intelligence agency, every think tank, every desperate analyst on Earth. And none of them had led anywhere. The flight, the alien manufacturer, the impossible price, the untraceable money, the aged inheritance, each new piece did not clarify the picture. It only deepened the fog.
But what the US government, and every government on Earth, was watching right now went beyond all of it. And beyond anything they had ever seen.
Because Liam Scott was standing on the surface of a moon of Jupiter, six hundred million kilometers from home, in a shirt and trousers, breathing air that did not exist... And he was fine.
In situation rooms and intelligence bunkers and hastily convened emergency briefings across a dozen time zones, the same feed played on the same screens, and the same silence hung over the same rooms full of the most powerful people on Earth.
In Washington, a room that had been assembled in under twenty minutes stared at the wall-mounted display where Elise’s livestream ran, the viewer counter in the corner spinning upward too fast to read.
Analysts who had spent careers explaining the inexplicable sat with their notes untouched in front of them. And an advisor near the back, a man not given to drama, said quietly what everyone in the room was thinking and no one wanted to be the first to voice.
"We have been investigating the wrong thing this entire time. We were investigating a rich man. That is not a rich man," he said.
No one argued with him but they all secretly agreed with him.
But it was the scientists who took it hardest, because they alone understood, in full and unbearable detail, exactly what they were looking at, and exactly why it could not be and shouldn’t be.
Across the world, in university departments and space agencies and the private channels where physicists and physiologists gathered, the same frantic conversation was unfolding, as they all posed questions to each other, in a bid to understand what they were watching.
First was the vacuum of space. A human body exposed to hard vacuum does not simply struggle. It fails, catastrophically, in a fixed and well-documented sequence.
Within the first few seconds the moisture on the tongue and eyes begins to boil away, because at zero pressure water turns to vapor far below body temperature. The gases dissolved in the blood come out of solution and expand. This is the same effect that gives divers the bends, but in space, it’s everywhere at once.
Any attempt to hold one’s breath ruptures the lungs, because the air inside has nowhere to go but outward through the tissue. Consciousness is lost in nine to fifteen seconds as oxygen-starved blood reaches the brain.
And death follows in roughly ninety. There is no training for it, no adaptation, no toughening. The human body is a pressurized system, and vacuum unmakes it.
But Liam Scott had been standing in it for minutes, talking, unbothered.
There was also the coldness of space. Though "cold" was almost the wrong word for it. Callisto’s surface sat at around minus one hundred and forty degrees Celsius.
At that temperature exposed tissue does not merely freeze; it hardens, the water in every cell crystallizing and splitting the cell walls apart from within. A hand exposed to it would be rigid in moments.
And yet that wasn’t even the real problem, because in a vacuum there is nothing to conduct the cold into him. Heat could only leave his body by radiation, slowly.
So the true thermal question was subtler and worse: a human being in space, generating heat and unable to shed it efficiently, would in some scenarios overheat rather than freeze. Either way the body’s narrow survivable temperature band — a few degrees on either side of thirty-seven — was a knife’s edge, and he was standing on a moon that respected none of it, in a shirt, and his temperature was evidently, impossibly, holding.
Last of them was the radiation, and here even the calm voices grew strained. Jupiter possessed the most savage radiation environment in the solar system, a magnetosphere that accelerated charged particles to lethal energies across millions of kilometers.
Callisto sat far enough out to be the safest of the great moons, but "safest" near Jupiter still meant a dose that would sicken an unshielded human in hours and kill them in not many more, tearing through DNA, collapsing cellular machinery, salting the body with damage no medicine could outrun.
A shielded ship could survive there. A shielded suit, barely, briefly. A man in cotton could not, and yet the man in cotton showed not the faintest sign of harm, and neither did the child sleeping against him.
And then, beneath all three, the simplest and most damning requirement of all. He was breathing.
There was no air on Callisto. None. Not thin air, or bad air but no atmosphere whatsoever, a pressure indistinguishable from the void. A human being needs a continuous supply of oxygen to the blood or the brain begins dying within minutes.
There was no oxygen. There was no source of oxygen. There was nothing for his lungs to draw, and his chest was rising and falling all the same, easily, as though the vacuum were mountain air.
Lay the four requirements side by side, the scientists said, and the conclusion was not merely that this was difficult.
It was that it was impossible. And they weren’t talking about impossible like a hard engineering problem, but impossible like a contradiction, a thing that violated the terms of what a human body was.
And here was the part none of them could talk their way around: there was no technology that solved even one of the four while leaving a man standing in ordinary clothes with nothing on his skin.
A suit could pressurize against the vacuum, but there was no suit. A heater could fight the cold, but there was nothing to house one. Shielding could turn the radiation, but shielding was mass and material and there was none. And nothing, nothing at all that humanity had ever built or theorized, let a man breathe where there was no air to breathe.
So it was not a suit. It was not a device. It was not Nova’s technology, however advanced, because technology was things, and there were no things between Liam Scott and the killing void.
Which left only one place for the answer to live, and the scientists arrived at it together, reluctantly, the way you arrive at a conclusion you have spent an hour trying to avoid.
The impossibility was not in his equipment. It was in him. Whatever was keeping him alive out there was not something he was wearing or carrying or standing inside. It was something he was.
His body was not being protected from the conditions that should have killed it. His body simply did not answer to those conditions at all. It was as though the rules that bound every other human being to the fragile, pressurized, oxygen-hungry, temperature-locked reality of flesh had, for him, quietly ceased to apply.
And that was a conclusion no scientist on Earth had a framework for. It was not a conclusion about technology, or wealth, or a company. It was a conclusion about the nature of the man — and it said, plainly, that he was not bound by the same nature as everyone watching him.